The “I’m out” was meant as a Shark Tank reference, and not to be taken too seriously. But I was serious about taking a break from Swift until version 4, when it would at least be more stable. Daniel and I followed up that week with a more in-depth discussion on Core Intuition 242.

A few days ago Craig Hockenberry posted about how the rapid pace of improvements to Swift can get in the way of learning the language and using example code:

It’s gotten to the point where every time I come across some information written in Swift, especially on Stack Overflow, I cringe. I know that I’m going to have to not only figure out the code, but also which version was used for the answer.

I have absolutely no regrets sticking to Objective-C. As Swift 3 was wrapping up, it seemed that the churn around syntax changes was even worse than I feared. From an Apple dev forums thread at the time:

For the expected quality of software in a third-generation project in late Beta, Swift 3 has become a trainwreck of Microsoftian proportions–at least in terms of process and expectation. Many of us devs are spending 90% of our time not developing our app, but babysitting Swift and trying to understand so many unvetted changes.

That settled down with the final Swift 3 release, but I expect many developers won’t upgrade from Swift 2.3 until Xcode forces them to. There’s even a whole book by Erica Sadun on migrating code.

I still consider Swift a beta language. I just hope that the Swift team and community recognize that this level of instability isn’t acceptable forever. A programming language is not an iOS or macOS release. There shouldn’t be a new major version of Swift every year.